Monday, September 8, 2014

Nickel and Dimed - On Not Getting By in America

Mike Lukovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

This cartoon really impacted me
because I saw it just after finishing Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in
America.

This book was inspired by the
welfare-to-work reform of the 1990s; it attempts to answer the question: can a person
live on minimum wage? Ms. Ehrenreich courageously endeavored to find out by
actually living the life of a low-wage worker (she was in her 50s which makes
her willingness to undergo the humiliations and physical strain even more
admirable). She spent a month in three different cities, working as a chain
restaurant waitress, maid, and Wal-Mart associate. She lived in housing and ate
the food that was affordable at her wages. She lived in horrible places—a tiny
trailer, a squalid motel, and ate fast food because of a lack of kitchen
facilities. Working one job full-time, she could barely afford to cover her
most basic expenses, and she had a lot of advantages: no children, and because
this was a short-term experiment, she didn’t have to worry about medical
expenses or things like clothing (other than what she had to purchase for the
job).

This experiment was done in 1999
and 2000, before the bursting of the dot-com bubble, when the country was
experiencing prosperity and jobs were easy to get. This was also before
corporations learned that they could save money by not hiring people as
full-time workers. Ms. Ehrenreich tried to work two jobs so she could afford a
better apartment; she just didn’t have the stamina required to pull off
cleaning hotel rooms in the morning and waiting tables in the evening.

She also discusses the
psychological effect of low-income work, that it encourages submissiveness and
lack of initiative. At the same time, she makes clear that these are
hard-working people, doing their best with the pitiful resources at their
disposal.

In the aftermath of the Great
Recession, things are much worse, which after reading her account, is hard to
imagine. Certainly, jobs are much harder to get. Ms. Ehrenreich was able to get
a job almost instantly in 1999; today she might have spent her entire 30-day
allotment just finding a job (if she was lucky).

Working-class people suffer from
major disadvantages when it comes to food. Most of the places Ms. Ehrenreich
could afford to rent had no kitchen facilities, so she had little choice but to
eat fast food. Lower-income neighborhoods often are “food deserts,” which means
there are no major grocery stores, just convenience stores and small markets
with poor quality produce. In addition, these stores’ prices are higher than in
the large chains that wealthier people can shop in.

National Geographic magazine is doing an eight-month series on “The Future of Food,” exploring
how we’ll feed nine billion people in 2050 without overwhelming the planet. In
the August issue the focus is on hunger in America. This
article documents that:

The diets of low-income Americans have worsened in the past
decade, even as the diets of the wealthiest Americans have improved, according
to a new study that is among the first to measure changes in diet quality over
time by socioeconomic status…[A] survey
from the food bank umbrella group Feeding America found that nearly 80 percent
of its clients bought the cheapest food available even though they knew it wasn't
healthy.

Accompanying one of the articles
was a graphic that stopped me in my tracks. “What’s For Dinner” compared what
$10 would buy at McDonald’s with what it would buy at a grocery store (see
below).

I did a quick calculation. Let’s
say my husband and I ate two meals a day at fast food restaurants, and we each spent
$10 on dinner and $7 on lunch. That’s $34 a day, or $238 a week, and that
doesn’t include morning coffee or any snacks. I spend less than this on our
groceries, and I buy organic produce, organic dairy products, and
better-quality meats! My grocery bill also includes gourmet coffee, cat food,
toilet paper, vitamins, whatever I buy at the various grocery stores where I
shop, so the actual cost of the food we eat comes to much less than that $34 a
day. And this includes almost all of our food consumption because we almost
never eat out—mostly because I think it’s a waste of money, and I like to cook.

As I was working on this post I
got an email from the New Yorker with
links to some of the stories in their latest magazine. “Dignity” is about
the fight to unionize fast food workers. The article focuses on a McDonald’s in
New York City, where

Most of the workers here make minimum wage, which is eight
dollars an hour in New York City, and receive no benefits. Rosa Rivera, a
grandmother of four who has worked at McDonald’s for fourteen years, makes
eight dollars and fifty cents. Exacerbating the problem of low pay in an
expensive city, nearly everyone is effectively part time, getting fewer than
forty hours of work a week. And none of the employees seem to know, from week
to week, when, exactly, they will work.

Ms. Ehrenreich mentioned this
uncertainty about your work schedule as another burden on the low-wage worker,
because it creates great difficulty in taking a second job.

The New Yorker article continues with some dismal statistics:

In 1968, the minimum wage, in current dollars, was $10.95. (Today, it’s $7.25)

But in Denmark McDonald’s workers over the age of eighteen
earn more than twenty dollars an hour—they are also unionized—and the price of
a Big Mac is only thirty-five cents more than it is in the United States.

Mother Jones has an online fast-food
wage calculator (scroll to bottom of story) where you enter the number of
people in your household, where you live, and your annual income. When you
click “submit” you get back the number of hours you’d have to work to earn that
sum. A household like mine (2 adults no children) needs to earn $29,821
annually to make a secure yet modest living. A fast-food worker working full
time would have to earn $14.29 an hour to make that much. Or, to make that much
at the federal minimum wage, I’d have to work 63 hours a week.

One of the arguments that
conservatives make to justify not raising the minimum wage is that those kinds
of jobs are meant for teen-agers. But as both Ms. Ehrenreich’s book and the New Yorker article make clear, there are
plenty of adults, with children, trying to survive on these jobs because there’s
not much else out there in this outsourced, downsized economy. Clearly there is
something wrong with an economic system that is failing so many of its workers
so miserably.

What’s For Dinner: At McDonald’s
you would get a Big Mac, large French fries, fruit and yogurt parfait, three
cookies, and a large soft drink. That same ten dollars in Washington DC would
buy you a half gallon of milk, half pound of green beans, one loaf of wheat
bread, bell pepper, two bananas, two chicken drumsticks, and “crown” broccoli.

About Me

I'm a philosopher, writer, videographer, and entrepreneur. In 2013 I've released a new book, "We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity." I'm the co-author with my husband Arthur Hancock of "The Game of God: Recovering Your True Identity.